Third Person

Batman Arkham City is not only a popular game with users but popular with testers thanks to its PhysX support and benchmark mode. As we explained earlier, Being an NVIDIA endorsed game, GPU accelerate PhysX throws a spanner into the works when we compare with other graphics.

It is very important to consider GPU v CPU PhysX when comparing NVIDIA endorsed games, with the default NVIDIA driver setting of 'auto', providing the right game, enhanced PhysX will be performed on the GPU. Enthusiasts who have played either of the three Batman Games or Borderlands may be familiar with the visual enhancements GPU PhysX provides, to myself not having the added NVIDIA exclusive features makes the game look bland and ugly. If the GPU supports extra visuals for little or no penalty, why not use them.

We want above 60 FPS at Vhigh and Extreme Details and GTX960 gives us this, with Normal PhysX enabled. We did not test high physx for comparative reasons. The AMD Radeon lost 30 FPS alone when we enabled GPU PhysX, and would lose more if we uped this, the code is simply not optimised for high performance on non NVIDIA hardware.

Lost Planet 2 benchmark has been a stalwart of DX11 and Tessellation testing, we may be hitting a threading or vendor optimisation issue with this one based on the numbers.

Resident Evil5 is an older DX10 test which does have alot of enemy AI despite being path scripted. Over the years it has given some weird results on hardware which shouldn't but given the rates all 3 compared cards give performance clearly is no issue here.